Breadcrumb navigation:

Letter from the Dean

spring 2003

Dear Alumni and Friends of Boston College Law School:

I was nosing around this afternoon in my favorite room at the Law School--the
Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room--looking at some student notebooks from
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and I was struck by how similar the
process of legal education was then to what I myself experienced thirty years
ago. The handwriting is a little nicer than mine, and some of the books are
bound in vellum. A few of the subjects are obsolete: Ulysses Selden's notebooks
from Litchfield Law School deal with Pleadings in Chancery (though they also
cover Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law, and Evidence). But method of transmission
from teacher to student, and from one student to another (even in those days
people swapped and swiped notes when they missed class), was familiar-lectures
copied by hand. Things were not very different for students who graduated five
years ago. This got me to thinking about the remarkable transformation that
has occurred in the process of legal education since 1999, when I arrived at
Boston College Law School. It has been largely invisible to alumni, even those
who visit the library and the rest of the campus. I refer to the role that personal
computers play at the Law School. Just as computers have had an impact on your
personal and work lives, so too have they changed the way law schools operate.

First--and Lasting--ImpressionsA student's introduction to the Law School today is likely to be an electronic
one. She will visit our homepage (http://www.bc.edu/schools/law/) to look at
the school before filing an application, and when she files it will be with
a lot less fuss than in the past. The online process is so convenient, in fact,
that these days most applicants file nine or more.

This change in technology, coupled with the fact that law school is an attractive
career choice in hard times, has led to a dramatic increase in the volume of
applications. Last year we had 7,232. This year we have 7,818, an increase of
8 percent over last year. Our Admissions Office, setting aside financial aid,
is the same size it was in the mid-1980's, when our applicant pool was half
what it is today. We simply could not handle this volume of work manually. As
it is, the use of electronic filing and our software for handling it (a program
called Admit M) allows us to be more service-oriented than ever before: we can
provide tours, offer information sessions, and devote attention to marketing.

The Changed Classroom Students who accept our offer of admission (this still arrives the old-fashioned
way, by letter) do their work in a different way. You probably are familiar
with how computers have changed legal research, because Lexis and Westlaw are
three decades old. What many may not know is how much laptops have changed the
way we teach classes.

Each spring I teach Constitutional Law to first-year students. Five years ago
10 percent of them took notes on laptops. Today most of them do, thanks in part
to our technologically up-to-date classrooms, where every desk is wired for
computers and students may use wireless connections as well. Laptops make it
easier for students to draft outlines and exchange notes (and, alas, to read
the newspaper online in class). The universal availability of laptops has also
changed the way I communicate with my students.

A week before classes began this spring, a suit was filed in federal district
court to enjoin the war in Iraq. It was a good case for introducing questions
of justiciability and separation of powers, so I decided to use it on the first
day of class. Four years ago I would have had to copy the complaint and track
down ninety students somewhere on break. Like many faculty members, though,
I have a web-based course page (WebCT) where I can post my syllabus, cases,
and news stories; carry on discussions; store old exams; and so on. I posted
a revised syllabus and a copy of the complaint, sent an email to alert the class,
and on the first day they were all prepared.

Grading bluebooks is the most unpleasant part of a faculty member's job, chiefly
because the art of fine penmanship died out in the middle of the last century.
But bluebooks themselves are now almost a thing of the past. Two thirds of our
students take their finals on laptops. Moving to this simple system was trickier
than it might seem.

Laptops can store vast amounts of information that students can easily retrieve,
which makes it hard to give closed-book exams. Since all of our buildings now
permit wired and wireless connection to the internet, students taking exams
can search Westlaw, Lexis, and online databases. Worse, they can talk with one
another via instant messaging. Two years ago we acquired exam software (ExamSoft)
that shuts down all of a laptop's whiz-bang functions and turns it into a simple
typewriter. Instead of bluebooks, students now generate a floppy disk; and faculty
get legible, formatted, double-spaced, spell-checked exams. ExamSoft also allows
students to download and take tests at remote locations, and faculty to score
and curve the results.

A Way to Connect
At the other end of the pipeline, students worry about jobs. The Career Services
Office used to help them in this process with Martindale-Hubbell, a copy machine,
long lines, and schedules written in pencil. Two years ago we brought this process
into the twenty-first century with an online program called eAttorney. It allows
students to upload resumes and cover letters, view schedules, and bid for interviews.
It permits the Career Services Office to schedule employers, communicate with
students, and collect internal statistics.

Even this letter has its electronic counterpart on the Alumni Relations and
Development webpage (http://www.bc.edu/schools/law/alumni/).
At present we encourage alumni to find us at this site if they want to learn
about news or events, make a donation, send us a message, or read a back issue
of our BC Law Magazine. As our directory of email addresses grows, we hope to
be able to reach out to you, and to provide timely information about alumni
activities such as the annual Supreme Court swearing-in and class reunions.
It is tempting to say that these improvements in communication have made life
better in all ways. On the whole they have. This is certainly true for our most
important constituency--our students. It is easier for them to apply, and they
get better and quicker service from our Admissions Office. The move to laptops
for classes and exams has been entirely student-driven; we have just responded
to the demand. With a web-based system in Career Services we can begin the recruiting
process in early August when students are still away at their summer jobs. Our
software allows them to sign up for interviews and leave resumes from remote
locations.

The computer culture has also changed the way young people learn. On balance,
this is neither good nor bad, just different. Students today have the ability
to do three things at once. They can do some kinds of research that were inconceivable
ten years ago. (A search engine like Google can find the annual mean temperature
on Antarctica in two seconds flat; consider where it can take the legal researcher.)
And the culture of scholarship has begun to adapt itself to this reality. One
of our young professors, Larry Cunningham, edits an online journal, part of
the Legal Scholarship Network, that publishes working papers on public law and
legal theory.

But laptops are so fast and seductive that we need to educate students about
their limitations, a mission we incorporate into our Legal Reasoning, Research,
and Writing classes. Online sources are a supplement, not a substitute for reading
statutes, annotations, and secondary sources. The information computers locate
is not always as reliable as an official report checked in Shepard's Citations.

The Ripple EffectI have been speaking about the effects on our students. Think now for a
moment about the administrative rearrangements these innovations entail. Nearly
all the changes I have mentioned have been managed by a group of four computing
professionals in our library. Those jobs didn't exist here ten years ago. We
need fewer secretaries and more technically skilled staff in departments like
Admissions and Career Services. Research librarians are not what they once were.
They used to offer research assistance to library patrons. They still do. But
they also develop print and web publications, help faculty with classroom technology
(like my WebCT), do technology training for students, and collaborate in teaching
legal research. The net change in personnel may be small (more professionals,
fewer secretaries), but it is all in the direction of greater technical proficiency.

It's not just the people who are different. These changes depend on an infrastructure
(power, internet connections, servers) that was laid in the construction of
the Library and the East Wing, and incorporated in the renovations of Stuart
House. They produce some obvious cost savings. (It costs $7,250 to print and
mail this letter to 10,000 alumni. At virtually no cost, our website gives us
another way to disseminate the letter to alumni who prefer to read it online.)
Overall, though, more and faster communication is more expensive. Every few
years we need to replace 175 of our computers. In the library we face a complex
set of new challenges. The availability of sources in both hard and electronic
formats has, for the time being, forced us to subscribe to both. (We can't be
sure that databases on the web will still be around in twenty years.) The software
revolution has given us better and faster tools for cataloguing, finding, and
lending research materials, but it means we must continually adapt our services
to build them in.

The application packets thick with paper, the colorful doodles in notebook
margins, the writer's cramp at test time, the tedium of resume revisions-these
centuries-old hallmarks of legal education have become nearly obsolete. It took
humankind five millennia to advance from handwriting to moveable type. It took
a little more than five centuries to move from the printing press to electronic
communication. It's surprising how we have become accustomed to doing things
electronically in the space of five years. I wonder how long it will be before
we have to learn something new.